#3 - John Coogan, Host of TBPN

Podcast: Relentless
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 4982s
URL: https://anchor.fm/s/e402cdc8/podcast/play/83017854/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2024-1-22%2F368318914-44100-2-cc5d34a112b49.m4a
Fetched: 2026-03-03 01:41:22

How is building Lucy than different than building Soilin? The biggest way Lucy has been different than Soilin is 100% the regulatory situation. So when you build the food products out for the listeners that might not know Soilin is a meal replacement shake. It's like a protein powder, protein shake, something that you might see on the door shelves at GNC or a gas station, like a muscle milk, something like that. And when you build one of those products, it's actually very, very simple from a regulatory perspective. You don't need to call the FDA. The FDA doesn't need to approve your product before it goes to market. As long as you're using ingredients that are, quote, unquote, generally recognized as safe or grass, you're fine. So think about it like when you walk into a grocery store. There's, you know, there's pre-made salads. Those salads might have some romaine lettuce, some cheese on them, some croutons. You don't need to get the combined salad approved everyone knows lettuce is fine, cheese is fine, croutons are fine. So you mix them together. Yes, you get a new product. It's a salad that's packaged at the grocery store, but it's not, there's nothing chemically changing. You can just add up the macro, micro nutrients, put a nutrition label on the back, and it's fine. And that's the way food products are regulated. That's the way Soilin was regulated and is regulated. You can of course get crazy if you're lying and you put the wrong nutrition facts on the back or you're breaking the rules or you're putting something in there that isn't approved as safe. But in general, if you're using generally recognized as safe ingredients, you can just go to market, sell it, you're fine. Compare that to ozempic or a cancer drug or insulin. These are drugs that are regulated by the FDA. Before they are sold to a single person, a human, there needs to be animal trials and human trials and double blind trials where you're giving it to patients and monitoring every detail about what the product does and the effect of that drug. Now, tobacco products and nicotine containing products like the ones we sell at Lucy, which include nicotine losenges, nicotine gums and nicotine pouches, primarily focus to help people switch off of cigarettes and vapes. Those are main competitors. For a long time, the entire tobacco industry and nicotine market was regulated much like the food industry. It's now recently become regulated like the drug industry. So every product that goes to market needs to be approved by the FDA now. And that means you have to send in your ingredients, you have to run scientific tests on the product, you have to see how the market will receive it, consumer testing stability. There's so many different pieces to these applications. And so from day one, we were thinking about our regulatory applications and how we would test our products and make sure that they get approved by the FDA. So that's been the biggest thing for sure. How much did it even cost to first like launch it? What was the cost? So getting a product, a new nicotine containing product like a new nicotine gum or new nicotine pouch to market can range in the millions to hundreds of millions of dollars. Very similar to a biotech where bringing a new cancer drug to market can cost hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses related to developing the product and testing it before the FDA approves it. Not to get too wonky, but there was a transition phase where the products were previously unregulated. Anyone could come to market with anything. That's where we saw the explosion of vapes. There were all sorts of different vapes, all sorts of different flavors and strengths and anyone could just whip one up and start selling it. That window of opportunity is closed. And so in 2016, actually if you go back to 2008, President Barack Obama passed some legislation that gave the FDA regulatory authority over nicotine containing products. That changed the fundamental structure of how these products get approved. That went into effect in 2016. And then these regulatory applications were kind of pushed around and the FDA is still working through them. So you might have heard that Jewel was recently denied their application. Zinn has not been approved yet, but things are looking very good for that product. And we're kind of in this where we've been. Some of our products have been accepted. Some of our products are still waiting. Fortunately, we've never been disapproved for anything. We're working very hard to work with the FDA, but it costs a lot of money. It's very expensive. It's good from a business perspective because it reduces competition in the long term. And it means that there will be fewer, bigger winners. One thing that we found in the nutrition and protein-shaped market was that there was always a new kit on the block and a new company that was growing very quickly with a new stunt or new marketing angle. And so the landscape was very, very competitive. The nicotine market is much less fragmented. Is it because it's so difficult to get a product market? Does that make it so mostly your competition is just big companies, which kind of like are still? Exactly. Okay. Interesting. So Soil and Lucy both have similar brand aesthetics. How do you think about designing a brand that really sticks in consumers' minds? Yeah. When I think of branding, I think there are two things that you have to get right when you're building a brand. The first is it has to appeal ridiculously to a very small niche audience. So with Soil that we were very, very fortunate in that we were these hacker kids in Silicon Valley building startups and writing software. That was who we spoke to. And so we built a brand that very naturally spoke to these aspirational entrepreneurs, software engineers. So we had a lot of luck with that. It was became a status symbol for a certain type of person. And the market was saturated with products like muscle milk that were very masculine testosterone driven, high protein, very intense. And those are great products but they just speak to a very different audience. And they weren't speaking to the programmer who doesn't really care about food. And so we were able to build kind of an anti brand. You see something similar happening with liquid death in the water category where all the water companies look exactly the same. It's just a beautiful picture of a mountain or a lake or a stream or an island in Fiji waters case. And then liquid death came out with something that feels exactly opposite. And it spoke to a very niche community of like metal heads. People who were now sober but wanted to drink something when they were out at a bar or a rock show. And so it spoke to a very very small audience. And then the so that's the first thing is like speak to a small audience. But then the second thing is like essentially crossing the chasm like you need to find a brand that can grow out of that and become appealing to to everyone. So when I think about you know red bull is known for marketing to the extreme sports enthusiast. They sponsor skydiving competitions extreme sports in the X games and all sorts of crazy aggressive you know F1 all these all these extreme sports. But now you don't need to be an extreme sports enthusiast to drink red bull. You can just be generally you know think like skateboarding is cool and be into that. And I think that's that's kind of the win condition is you know liquid death cannot be successful if you have to be in a metal band to drink it. But if you think that heavy metal is kind of cool and funny and whatever it's nice then that can be a much larger audience. So figuring out how to first break through all of the noise and start growing and then make the brand more broad over time while keeping some level of focus and differentiation while the market kind of coalesces around those ideas broadly. So monster another great example I mean energy drinks are fantastic at this like you look at Celsius what they did with the CrossFit community obviously now Celsius is not truly identified with like the gym crowded but they because they were able to kind of break out beyond that. Yeah is it is it any different when you're marketing a nicotine product? No it's not if you're doing it as a startup or a small company it is different if you're a big tobacco company that's launching a product because brand is much less important because you have billions of dollars coming in from your legacy cigarette products like some of these companies literally cash flow billions of dollars. And so you can subsidize the cost and effectively wage and win a price war. And then also you have a massive distribution advantage from all the trucks that are dropping off your cigarettes at every corner store in America there's I think there's a hundred thousand stores in America that sell protein shakes there's almost three hundred thousand that sell nicotine products and cigarettes. It's every there's dedicated tobacanists where you can just go and get tobacco products in every city you'll see a vape shop. I've never seen an energy drink shop or a protein shake shop maybe GNC accounts but not really certainly not in the way that there's a vape shop on so many corners. And so if you're a if you're a big tobacco company the branding issue is much less important. I think it does create some fragility and it does create some some surface area for attack but you really can't discount how valuable um having a dismantle a monopoly on physical retail distribution where 99% of tobacco products are sold um these are this is not books this is not TV no one buys cigarettes on amazon you legally cannot that's a that's a federal law you cannot buy cigarettes online. Does it just been at forever or well ATF I'm not exactly sure when but you know over a decade ago like they effectively they've never been sold effectively really online because cigarettes are very they're they're used for all sorts of like trafficking and mafia like the old like the mafia would if you steal a truck of cigarettes that's one of the most valuable if you're thinking of like fast and furious or they're stealing like DVD players um stealing cigarettes is way way way way way more valuable because think about a pack of cigarettes can sell for ten dollars and think about how small it is it's so small so you're basically just stealing a pot pallet of cash yeah exactly and so the ATF has always been really really and there's just so many of these cigarettes flowing around the United States um it's not exactly the same as like iPhones like people don't buy as many iPhones as they do cigarettes so uh anyway it's it's it's very complicated but uh yeah the the the larger brands they do take branding seriously they do think about that but um it's much less important to for them to really have a brand that speaks to a specific niche because they can just put the product everywhere immediately on day one just makes it easier I would actually be really curious so I've heard that like Warren Buffett talks about consumers uh having like a taste memory um and certain you know for food people do uh which means that you don't want to eat McDonald's every single day of the week you eat it once and then you kind of get bored of it and you know week later you're okay with eating it again um is that and and they don't have it for drinks so you can just drink cocoa all day yeah you just pick up another coke and keep on drinking it um how does that work with uh with nicotine like pouches and stuff I mean it's the it's the most it's the most loyal customer segment in any consumer product category by far um like the a a marboros smoker will only smoke marboros for decades and decades and decades like they they don't bounce around um they only buy what they like um for a variety of reasons but um yeah extremely high brand loyalty um I think the old tobacco products have done you know a remarkable job I mean this these these tobacco product they they built whole marketing agencies like like people made fortunes on this stuff and the marboromane is still iconic like the camel marketing campaigns are still iconic and they they definitely speak to a certain aesthetic and when I say Virginia Slims or camel crash or new ports or uh marboro red or Virginia Slims like all of these are like wildly different like a a a certain individual pops into your mind for each one of those and that's a testament to the strength of the brand that's interesting I didn't realize that um okay so you've done YC twice uh first with soil and then with Lucy and then I know that you also did like a hacker house or something at the beginning that emerged from YC yeah okay um so what was the most impactful thing about YC to you and uh do you have any great stories from your experience mostly just the competition I think it's a hyper competitive environment with a bunch of other entrepreneurs who are on the exact same time scale so everyone needs to show traction present on stage at demo day and then try and raise money in this like knock out drag out fist fight with every other company and so it's an incredibly effective forcing function like you'll be at a YC dinner and there'll be someone like Mark Zuckerberg sitting on stage telling you about how he built Facebook and you'll look over and there'll be some you know nerdy founder who's like writing code on his laptop because he thinks it's more important to build be then listen to Zuckerberg talk which is just like you see that and you're like wow that guy's getting ahead of me right now like um and maybe it's just aesthetics and maybe it's not maybe should be paying attention or whatever but it just speaks to kind of the the level of competition um everyone hears who's doing well in the batch everyone's everyone learns very quickly um you know what what what hacks are working what growth strategies are working what product strategies are working who's who's effective at fundraising and I think it just it just puts everyone on on a on a timetable to say you know like what can you get done in essentially one quarter um and that's just very it's a really really good forcing function when it can be very easy to say oh like you know when do I really need to start this company when do I really need to launch it when do I really need to raise money um YC just puts you on a timetable and then once you're through that obviously you're you're you're in the you're then on ideally on the venture timetable which is like 12 to 18 months of runway you got to work really hard you got to get to the next round you got to build a real business and everything kind of flows from there but um in terms of going from zero to one and really like quitting your job going full-time like really burning the ships behind you and and um have it starting to see entrepreneurship is the only option it's a very good forcing function for that so I actually just thought about something um do you think that because you've got all these things pushing you towards like you've got envy you've got you know you've also you're also seeing all these people execute really well and all the stuff um do you think it makes the people that go through the program do things that they wouldn't do otherwise hmm sure I mean certainly work harder work long weekends and nights and stuff like just things that are like less socially acceptable um or there's pressure against it um but when you're in the YC community you have a bunch of people that you look around and everyone's doing the same crazy stuff so it's a lot more acceptable um the other kind of broad benefit of YC is that it's kind of like a union for early stage entrepreneurs in that they they've kind of establish rules of the road for like the baseline of founder friendliness in the venture community and so if VCs act very poorly and try and screw over entrepreneurs at the early stage they'll get banned from demo day which can have an effect there's also you know like if you screw over one YC founder that news can spread within the YC community in in a way that you know during the dot com boom or previous you know venture cycles um it would be a lot hard it would be a lot easier for venture capitalists to get away with screwing over a founder now there are other factors like you know just being able to tweet about stuff or you know write a blog about something that that acts as more a forcing function but I think YC was a pretty critical part of the story of rebalancing the power between founders and investors now you could argue that in the latest bubble the balance was two in favor of the founder and perhaps some founders took advantage of that and raised too much money and did all sorts of stuff but uh overall I think YC has been a really really great forcing function and just a great impact on the venture community and is an important institution that may should may it live for a thousand more years have you ever not taken money from someone because of a YC founders recommendation I'm trying to think like specifically it's it's hard to put like a pinpoint moment unlike we had a term sheet and we turned it down it's usually just like there's a little bit of less enthusiasm for taking an intro um but I would say like yes I can think of one fund that specifically was notorious for like basically investing in American startups and then cloning the ideas internationally and seemed very predatory and I think they reached out early and we might have had one meeting and then um we kind of knew that they were sharky but it was made even more clear and so we declined to work with them um but again it's like it's unclear that we would it we would have worked with them but there are plenty of examples of that for sure okay yeah I think I might be thinking of the same person uh did they clone Airbnb I don't know I actually don't I don't remember the portfolio at all okay um so I have this is a little bit of a strange question but you are very consistently kind of like trying at from my perspective you're trying to help humanity in the products that you're creating and so I wanted to ask kind of a invert question which is imagine your evil cougan which means that you have no ethical no ethical holdups and your sole purpose is to make uh the biggest company that you possibly can what product would you create and what tactics would you use to make it grow it's a fun thought experiment it's kind of hard because I think the I think the market and capitalism and the American system is like it's pretty good at allocating capital towards economically valuable and morally good things there really aren't that many companies that are making a lot of money doing something very very bad you can argue the cigarette companies obviously like um but I definitely wouldn't start a cigarette company that's insane because the the the the government regulators the consumers have woken up to this and the media has woken up to the the facts about cigarettes and so starting a new company in that space would be terrible um I don't know I mean it seems like the one the one's form of like fraud or immoral gain that's somewhat Lindy and never seems to go away is just kind of like get rich quick schemes um that would probably be the easiest way it wouldn't necessarily be a big company it'd be very hard to build a a a massive like you know empire around get rich quick schemes and courses I do think I do think there's probably some way to go deeper in the stack like I know there's some people that like like the fake gurus who will teach a course on how to get rich and it's like teaching you about dropshipping and then the real like you know like as we move towards the galaxy brain version of this there's a like the second level is like you teach people to go and teach a course on how to get rich and so now we're like two layers deep and then I think you could go probably three layers deep by like building a software company that helps people sell courses to help people get rich so now you're like three layers of abstraction away from like getting rich quick and then you could probably go even deeper into the stack and then you eventually you probably just wind up building like a really great like you know internet company or something like AWS is probably sitting at the bottom of the stack of all the get get rich quick schemes um and then you realize that there's there's probably more economically valuable um activity that could happen on top of your technology platform um but yeah I don't know it's fun to think about yeah I was I mean it's very it's kind of difficult because you can't there's very few uh you can't really scam people if you want to build a trillion dollar company right like yeah I don't think like the trillion dollar company is like on the table if you're doing something wildly immoral or illegal but I mean certainly making like you know tens of millions of dollars a month or a year is like well within the world that was possibly yeah only fans um there are plenty of there are plenty of categories that I would not touch for ethical reasons that are legal and can provide um significant economic rewards yeah for sure okay so this is a good one uh you've worked with co-founders on all of your companies if I'm correct yeah what have you learned from those experiences and do you have any insights on how to maintain a successful co-founder relationship yes um my experience co-founders has been good it's been worth the delusion it's great to have you know people that are super aligned from day one and working alongside you I think there's a few things one is that the longer the relationship like the lindiness of the relationship is super valuable so my my main business partner I went to preschool with him we went to middle school in high school together we went to college in the same town we started we started three companies now together and so there's just like you know we're both married we live in the same town we have family friends so there's just all these different like social forcing functions to like not screw each other over whereas like you know if me and you started a company and you live in Alaska and I fuck you over like good luck bro go back to Alaska like talk shit no ask I or something like it's just not it's just not like obviously like people think about it that way but there is like a social pressure that's important and and you just learned all the different ways to interact with someone over a very long time so so like having a long long standing relationship over a number of years good good friendship good just good relationship general is is very valuable um and then but I but I do think like the flip side of that is that it can be very difficult to build a company if you don't have a single decision maker at the top and so I think it's very important to identify early like who is the CEO and then empower the CEO to have the final decision on basically everything even though there might be other co-founders and then that's that's valuable like the co-founder title is one thing but the CEO title is a completely different thing and it becomes more and more important as the company gets bigger and bigger and bigger um and so you don't want every decision turning into a committee vote I think that really really slows down progress and so um empowering whoever the CEO is to have the confidence to be able to move forward and make gutsy decisions take risks and um you know the idea that just like the buck stops with them and they're responsible for the decisions that they make and they live with the consequences and just having the trust of the organization to say yes we are we want a leader not a bunch of leaders where the credit and blame can be reassigned and shuffled distributed yeah and that's the problem with so many dysfunctional organizations so you started three companies with this person I didn't realize that you knew them since uh pretty school uh so you were you like played video games in high school and like I guess you're scuba diving yeah we were actually on rival counter strike teams how that happened oh I just like I think my team was a little bit better than him he was like to be team now uh uh you heard it here first like he was just like there were 10 guys and uh and he was close with like five of them and I was close with like the other five more a little bit more and so we kind of naturally formed into two separate teams that we'd scrimmage each other and play uh and yeah it's gives good times so okay I'm actually kind of curious in alternate let's say like in an alternate reality is there a world where John Cougan decided like not to start companies and just play video games like I don't think so there's never that good video games and I think I always knew that that would not be enough I like the competition I have a lot of respect for professional esports players and uh but I don't think it would be enough I it's just not big enough of a problem for me to solve I I think business poses like more interesting long lasting problems um but there's certainly something that's like extremely satisfying about just uh like being a professional gamer and like trying to get to the top and grind and a bit win and it's just competition it's great love it yeah how how do you decide like you know you started your first company and then my understanding is you just like tried a bunch of different things yeah and it didn't really work yeah and then you went on a soil hunt yeah because your friend like you know decided that they were running out of money because we tried a bunch of stuff and we we needed to extend our runway and so uh making our own food was the cheapest way to get assistance you need to write more code essentially it was a great like story great great marketing PR story uh for like launching that brand for sure what was what was the original like formula for soil hunt I don't know it's just some protein carbs fats micro nutrients like you know you need calcium B vitamins you need I just like look at the back of any FDA nutrition label we put a hundred percent of everything they recommended it and that was like the unique differentiator was that when you look at the back of any food product you see a bunch of decisions that people have made like daily value things daily values yeah exactly so uh if you if you look at the back of a muscle milk you see like high protein maybe low carbs uh maybe low fat maybe some micronutrients that they've decided would be interesting active and functional additives but we just said like let's just do a hundred percent which is silly and just like very entertaining and very differentiated and that was like it's a good marketing stick too yeah exactly good marketing stick and and it was an interesting like that value proposition and thought experiment like if you drink this can you live off of it forever yeah the FDA says you can like the government literally says like not only can you but you will be perfectly healthy yeah I don't know that's true obviously that can be correct because everyone's different but yeah exactly so calls into all sorts of questions about you know like different diet restrictions for different people do we need customized nutrition there's a whole bunch of different stuff that goes into that but but it was a very interesting thought experiment it made for great great press articles yeah and then what was what was like the first I imagine this is something that you would remember what was the first press article where you saw that you know this thing was working oh the original like launch blog post went like insanely viral yeah on hacker news and then because the CEO stopped eating food for a month and lived on this product exclusively for a month so it was that sounds like a mystery video actually yeah it does it was it was kind of proto youtube it yeah it's fascinating that now that's like you know the standard kind of like how Ryan Trehan had that penny series yeah and that was based on another guy who did who did a penny trade are you familiar with this I yeah so for those that don't know Ryan Trehan like win across America and then also just went like flew back to America yeah using just a penny he just starts as a penny and then he trades that for a pen and then trades that for a bottle of water and then sells that for five dollars and then trades that for a bus ticket trades that for and he just trades all the way up to wherever and there's a there's famous story back in like the 90s or early 2000s where a guy traded a penny for a house and and yeah these these kind of like viral in interesting formats they just keep keep coming out I mean Mike was it Mike Roe or you know someone someone who did supersize me did he lived in McDonald's for 30 days or yeah and then you got just horribly yeah really sick uh stressed us go way way back I mean Ogle V uh one of the marketing geniuses um was tasked with creating an ad campaign for a glue company and glue is extremely I glued a car to the wall because glue is an extremely I thought it was a car to a wall I think it actually might be he glued someone's shoes to the ceiling and then had the had the the actor tell you about the product and you can't look away because if the glue doesn't hold he's going to fall and break his neck and it's inherently high stakes and so um when when Rob announced that he was going to be that he did stop eating food and was going to live on this for 30 days straight of course everyone had to chime in with their two cents you're gonna die this is evil this is great I want this I'll pay you for this and there were a lot of haters but you know for every 10 haters there was one super fan and so that converted into I think the first month we went live we sold like a million dollars a product in a month and was it just was it just like polarizing I know that you guys structured it so that you know soiling green yep that was like not bully engineered like a lot of this stuff was just like getting lucky and going off of instinct and gut but yeah I mean the name was was was a phenomenal choice for early growth because every time we'd post anything on Facebook everyone in the comments would be like you're an idiot there's this movie that you've never heard of that is about cannibalism like why would you say it's like obviously we know about it we're making a joke but people would still comment and then that would propel it to the top of every like everything we'd post would go viral because people would be commenting um and you know it was like peak boomer Facebook era like so many uncles on Facebook like wanting to comment on everything um and so yeah we were just like viral machines basically so have you thought about how to make I mean I know it's much harder with a nicotine product because you don't want to end up like you don't want it to go super viral because if you go super viral then like kids will start seeing it so it's much more important to be like targeted with the advertising in the tobacco in nicotine industry um so we we deliberately like like you reign it in yeah I mean there are ways to to reach adult smokers in interesting ways and and we've we've tried some of that a lot of it's just like you know advertise on podcast that kids obviously don't listen to you know like some sort of like you know gen-exer political show is not going to be listened to by a bunch of 17 year olds and so we're not really at risk of kids using the product um but that's the number one thing that we want to stay away from have you thought about how to so I really love I think probably my favorite product right now is a sleep and they are so incredible at getting they're basically establishing a brand as the thing that you have if you're someone like if you if you're you know top performance athlete if you're the Elon Musk CEO do that's changing the world you using a sleep right are you using a sleep right I don't track my sleep oh my god well I I probably should uh I've met Mateo I I should reach out to him and and get one um I have no doubt that it's a great product I just don't have any problem sleeping and so I avoid finding solutions for problems that don't exist um like if I'm not if I'm not waking up in the middle of the night and I'm not sleepy during the day I assume that I don't have a problem and then I don't need to mess around with it um super interested in it though like I I think that's the case for a lot of quantified self-stuff honestly I I it's great for certain people if they need it but um for some things if you're in tune with yourself like you can ask yourself if you're hungry and then you can just go eat that's a rare train or there's that is very rare most people yes you are okay unusual uh yeah I don't know in a good way yeah teach their own it's like not needing ozimpic I guess it's got natural ozimpic um yeah but like so focusing back on a sleep yeah how you know they are just establishing establishing themselves as this very premium ultra premium yeah brand they've done a great job I mean Mark Zuckerberg uses one it's like incredible and Ela like that's on their product page yeah yeah yeah so like that is phenomenal how you know you've got you're going up against competitors have way better distribution yeah have way more dollars um have you thought about how to establish your brand with uh Lucy yeah it's like the go-to thing the premium thing it's tricky like an aspirational yeah it's hard to reverse engineer like obviously you can sponsor people and put your put your brand in a key place like an example for eight sleep would probably be I think they sponsor an F1 car and so obviously I think like you know Mark Zuckerberg or I think Tim Koch went to F1 I don't know if he's talked to them but uh you know it's not crazy to think that like influential people will be there it's kind of like the very top of the funnel or the top of the the start to a like a daisy chain that leads to endorsements from very influential people and then it becoming a trend and so there are some things that you can do where you can buy it some of it can be just built very over very slowly over time like hand-to-hand combat I'm sure some of those eight sleep influencers just heard about the product randomly or heard about it from a friend and eventually if the product's good it will find its way and so uh it can be hard to force there are sponsorships and influence campaigns that you can run but um they're very hard to get right they're very hard to structure properly yeah I I almost have this like a theory that people vastly undervalue uh like if you take founders podcast right that I think is an insanely valuable asset maybe worth like half a billion dollars just ridiculous and maybe it's a billion maybe it's more uh because it's all about like even if he doesn't you know decide to create a VC fund or something he might be able to raise like a billion dollars tomorrow or like two or more um and so where was I going with that anyway uh but if you think about him he's he's broadcasting to the most valuable audience in the world which are true I mean they're the most high leverage people in society right they're founders they invent products that scaled millions or billions of people um and you think about that and you say okay so he's taking this idea that A sleep is really good and helps you improve performance or whatever and then he's broadcasting it to the people that have a voice themselves yep right and so that's just insanely high leverage totally advertising channel yep um anyway but you're you're kind of doing that too yeah certainly trying to you're trying okay yeah um um i mean it's a little bit different because everyone needs to sleep but not everyone uses nicotine and um we specifically want to reach you know smokers people who vape and that cuts across a very like our product is not dramatically more expensive than other products it's actually cheaper than cigarettes in many ways in certain states depending on the taxes and so um the mission of the company is a little bit different it's not strictly it's not this like performance enhancement for any one that and this is like this high end product it's very very different from A sleep um although obviously that's phenomenal brand love the company but um it's it's different because you know we're targeting like 10 or 20% of America okay use the vapes we're not we're like we're not trying to like i don't know if Mark Zuckerberg uses nicotine i think he probably doesn't so i'm not trying to get him as a customer you're not trying to convert people to aren't nicotine i i'm kind of curious like i know that cigarettes have these negative health effects um but i would imagine that using your product is very similar to drinking a cup of coffee it is that doesn't i mean if you if you take away the negatives there's you know lots and lots of people to drink coffee yeah i don't really see a whole like i see the reason if your lungs are dying right and it ages you but i don't see a reason why you wouldn't add this to the potential like options make stack yeah i mean it it has been added to the potential options like it's available in 300,000 stores in America like like it could not be more available um i think people are aware of it and i mean to back to go back to the point of like you know does personalized nutrition or something like big people have different work environments they have different responses to stimulants um there's some people that benefit from caffeine there's some people that don't like using caffeine and so i don't think a one-size-fits-all approach is right for stimulants generally but just for your branding you're not trying to convert the unconverted you're just trying to get the people that are killing themselves to not yeah right now like i mean we're talking about a trillion dollar industry like yeah like you truly do not need to add anyone like merely moving people around and i mean cigarettes kill 50% of people that use them like they killed more people than covid ever did every single year it's like insane like the numbers are just like staggering and so like there's just so much opportunity in the core market like you don't you don't need to think about that and then also like it's so much harder to sell someone who's not using nicotine than someone who's already smoking and their girlfriend is complaining about how much they smell and it's expensive and it's gross and then they've also heard about health stuff and there's like a bunch of different things going on it's so much easier to go after that customer and and convert them and like we see that as a win the FDA kind of sees it as a win they're like very cagey about it they won't fully admit it for some of our for some of our products they will but for some of our products they're waiting but i think with with like in in enough time they will they will be proud to um they they will be celebrating everyone who quit smoking um i certainly hope that that's what happens at the FDA i would hate for the FDA to uh land in a place where they continue to incentivize smoking which is a very strange thing that would be a terrible it's strange but strange things happen all the time in the government there's all sorts of different interests and all sorts of different incentives and so you know it would not be irrational to if you're working at the FDA and you want to get a job at a big tobacco company to improve the you know performance of big tobacco like just like at the end of the day like these are human beings and human beings have all sorts of incentives um not everyone is like this perfectly rational scientist so um i yeah basically the market's huge and it's just super valuable to go after people who are already smoking um getting people who don't use nicotine to use nicotine is just like harder it doesn't really achieve the mission and it's not it's just not very economically valuable interesting yeah it's like and the people that do use nicotine uh regularly they're like a very high number of times like you know how much luck do you think uh you know eight sleep has advertising to people who like live off the grid in a tent you know it's like like they shouldn't go after those people but you know what they should definitely go after Mark Zuckerberg because he probably has plenty of room in his house for a nice bed and he probably has power and he can definitely get um he can definitely you know afford it and wants the best most comfortable most optimized bed possible yeah and he's also signaling to millions of people or at least a few hundred thousand that like this is what i use it's it's kind of like you know people want or people look up to others right so if Elon says something people listen right yeah and i think it's the same thing with Mark Zuckerberg i mean maybe more after today but um yeah yeah uh okay um yeah what is your driving philosophy i know it's kind of creating good things but what what on top of that what gets you up in the morning i mean like what motivates me is uh like pursuit of information and like finding some sort of base reality understanding how the world works solving puzzles learning like that type of stuff but that's all that's all in service of like like a broader goal of um like the expansion of humanity expansion of gdp expansion of life expectancy like all of those things that i think like kind of allow humanity to climb the cosmic scoreboard and just put more points on the board i think more people more more gdp the better um yeah just gotta be gotta be flourishing gotta bring prosperity and abundance that's the main like overarching goal um there are a bunch of different ways to slice at that but i mean like like nicotine is interesting because it's one of those things that's misunderstood and i and i really really enjoy learning about things that are that are misunderstood that's always that's always fun like focusing on anything that's non-consensus and controversial it's always a fascinating area and i can't believe it's been eight years and this is still so controversial and still so misunderstood yeah it's like arbitraging what people think uh versus what the reality is like what actual reality is yeah because eventually if you're right the world will catch up to you and you'll be able to reap the benefit and by that time you know you've got like a ten billion dollar company or something hopefully okay um i so i guess this kind of uh leaves right into it but what is the purpose behind your youtube channel a bunch of different purposes i think the first one was probably i mean there's a little bit of a narrative where it was like kind of bored during pandemic it was a good way to kind of meet people online create a magnet like wouldn't have met you without this and now we're having this interesting conversation if i was if i'd just been playing video games all throughout the pandemic probably wouldn't met you wouldn't have this nice conversation right so just in terms of like i like meeting people and having conversations mission accomplished i think there's also something to the Feynman method the Feynman technique which is like learning by teaching and once you teach something you understand it better and so i find that if i want to understand you know the you know the dynamics of uh you know should we ban tiktok or not well if i go and spend a day researching it write a youtube script and record it and edit a video like i usually come away with a pretty solid thesis and i feel fairly confident talking about that topic much more so than if i just watched a different video on it and came away with like one thing that i was parroting so developing like true new theories about the world um the process of research and writing is super valuable there and then there's obviously economic value you mean a lot of people have hired people have made money through it there there's a bunch of different like values there but um oddly i didn't and still don't really think i'm optimizing for like ego and fame i see i see youtube is kind of or just like building a personal brand is like kind of a necessary evil to get what you want it's like i don't know i've gone back and forth on this a lot but i i think it's i think it's extremely high leverage and it's very valuable but um it in and of itself is not the end goal for me yeah i don't think that's true for a lot of youtubers i think a lot of youtubers like this is the best job ever i love this i want to do this forever i like just like making videos and then being famous and that's cool and that's great and that's like how that industry should actually work um i'm kind of like a tourist in the space that you are also a tourist that like really gives a shit like the quality on your videos is insane yeah i i really do enjoy the the process of of making them and i i think it's a fascinating world it's just such a blank canvas like anything from a one-second video to a 10-hour video i saw a video in my feed yesterday that was a 12-hour analysis of star wars episode one did you see this pop-up on yours now but i'm thinking of like a 40-hour count of a hundred thousand with mr. me yeah yeah yeah but i mean that that is crazy impressive that that jimmy did that it's all but like this was this was 12 hours of a person analyzing a two-hour movie like that's crazy every little piece of lore every little factoid and so it's just like you can do anything it can be a vlog it can be p o v it can be you know a podcast it can be you know animation like it's just it's just endless which is just it's just fun it's just a cool problem to solve and like optimize the other thing that i'm kind of fascinated by about what you've done so when i first you know you first said that you would take the interview i popped on one of your videos and then i just went down the rabbit hole and for the next like probably 12 or 13 hours i was just watching these videos on devil you know speeds and i was like oh my god they were really good anyway um do you think that you could quantify or have you thought about the value that you're creating because it's not only that you're creating these interesting videos it's also that you know some person out there somewhere might see it and be kind of curious yeah i mean you can absolutely quantify the value how much money did you make from it well not even you i'm saying about like you're impacting others so i mean like if you're an economist you would say like okay how much money do do do the videos make an ad revenue what's youtube's cut okay let's true that up so it's twice whatever you've made on the on the video in ad revenue and then someone had to pay for that so there was a surplus there and then there was a consumer surplus for whatever product they bought so it's probably like five x to ten x whatever the ad revenue is roughly probably i mean if you if you believe in like you know somewhat efficient economic markets i don't know like it's just one way to slice it you could also try and think about it like some other vague way someone gets inspired they started being company and create something but like how would we even pin that number down you wouldn't know you wouldn't know but it's it's kind of like with the founders podcast you have no idea what the actual value of that podcast is and like i mean neural link and everyone's brain you measure the amount of dopamine or something put a dollar value on dopamine maybe you get there i don't know it's just like it's kind of pointless it's not really helpful for your actual like decision making on what to go into is just like curiosity is what it's driving a decision to make a video yeah i mean i i think the cool i think the cool thing about it is just like it's just an example of like scale on the internet like you can put out a video and it can get a million views and that's like a million people like i think like my for my my breakdown of season paying like two million people have watched that it's like 40 minutes long yeah so it's like that is not that's not like a arena show like that is like that's like more people than gather for like some of the biggest like protests in the world it's like 40 minutes yeah it's like yeah 40 arenas or something i don't know it's like a lot of people and uh and and and that that type of scale and impact was like is only possible on the internet and i do think it gets like kind of commoditized away because it's so easy just to look at like oh well well mr. Beast pulls a hundred million every video so like what's two million um but if you if you really like take a breather you're like wow that's like that that that is like a big thing and it's crazy that you could do that like just like in a few days of like writing and researching and then a few days of editing and then you put it up and like it happens just because the internet's there and then like truly was impossible like a hundred years ago and so it's kind of a it's kind of a cool you know it's a cool way to experience modernity have you thought at all about how to get more people to start companies i don't know that that's a problem really i mean especially not during the bull market like in the bull run like their new company started every single day um how would we know the way i think about it is there's lots of lots of forces and when you're growing up 99% of the population is not growing up in a in a home that's like you should start a startup that's a very rare thing and so you have all these influences that are kind of influencing your psychology and decision making on whether or not to go to college whether or not to go to the job whatever um and i'm kind of wondering if you could flip that where the default or create some some way where you're influencing lots and lots of people to start companies instead of taking those traditional paths yeah i mean so america still has the bifar the strongest entrepreneurial culture in the world it's not even close like all of the best businesses the last two decades have been started here or china and you can kind of debate like how entrepreneurial that is but it's it's it's an incredible it's an incredible country and we have a very strong entrepreneurial culture as you upregulate the amount of entrepreneurship your potentially the average quality of the company goes down potentially the amount of fraud increases you get more thorough noses um it's not it's not clear that we need more companies so fast forward 30 years uh what would you like to be known for i don't really care i'm i don't want to be known for anything i don't really i don't even think about that i don't even think about like wanting to be known for things i don't think about legacy um i i want to know things i want to i want to know things i want to have solve puzzles i want to i want to understand uh you know exactly what happens when that what what leads to a president getting elected i want to know how a company gets built i want to know i want to be able to foresee things before they happen and i want to know um why certain things happen in the past and so i don't care if i'm known for something or not the the way that i was actually trying to phrase that question was you know Jeff Bezos is he's you know 1993 or whatever a year before it starts amazon where he's look he's projecting himself forward and saying what will i regret doing if i don't do it that was my thing is like i love what it's not that you'll necessarily be known for it but like 30 years from now you've succeeded at whatever it is that you're trying to succeed at what does that look like yeah um because that is a different question than like people knowing about you yeah i mean in terms of like super long-term goals i'm an entrepreneur i've been an entrepreneur for a decade no plans to stop so i want to continue being an entrepreneur for the next three decades i hope that looks like sounding a really big company i hope that looks like running it for a very long time building something very big and impactful and having a very loving family and tight-knit close group of friends and that's pretty much it do you think that you're ever going to you know you wanted to be an astronaut i assume that you'll be at the level of wealth where you can just take a trip on starship or something right probably like ten or fifteen years but ten or fifteen years i mean you can go on the baseless rocket like tomorrow yeah but you want to have a fun time you know yeah around the earth a few times that seems very fun honestly um and it's what 20 apple vision pros something that isn't 100k i think pros 4k so yeah i think he's trying to get down like a trip tomorrow is it 500 grand oh no no i'm not talking about mine i'm just going to space but yeah um yeah obviously uh yeah exploring the stars is very very important and uh it's it's it's very very critical that um that we don't abandon it i think there's a serious risk that um people turn in words and AI and VR create abundance and people don't go outside and they don't conquer the stars and people just sit and you know they enter the matrix essentially like i i think there's a you know a non zero chance that in the next like 30 or 40 years like a high percentage of the human of the human population is like essentially um static yeah they don't move around and they don't go anywhere now delian it found it fun has a theory about like speciation how like the human human species will like fracture i think that's a good take um i think it's possible that we kind of divide into like the adventurers and the wire headers i guess and so there's a bunch of people that are um you know living on earth in like a matrix type of situation but i do think that there will be some people that jack out and leave actually go explore and go explore and and the the the question is like what is the critical mass that you need for that to work because like SpaceX is a big company their whole supply chains a big company like the economy is integrated like like fundamentally like they they need everything from you know aluminum manufacturers to corporate credit cards and hr software to run that company effectively it's not enough just to have a rocket like you need an economy to actually make um the jump to the next planet and so what does that look like is that a billion people could a billion people do it could a hundred million people do it could ten million people do it um and so if we start losing people significantly either due to like population collapse lack of reproduction or people just dropping out of the the the exploratory society and kind of living in that matrix world um if you have too few you just won't be able to actually make it happen the problem that i see is like if you can watch someone's brain react to stimuli right you can have an AI that's perfectly create like i'm thinking i was thinking in a car yesterday about you know having some thing hooked up to your head reading to your brain waves and then literally creating a show on the spot with perfect accuracy on exactly what you want to create it to exactly what you want well you don't even create create the show you can just you can just stimulate the neurons to give you pleasure and so you can just be endlessly and endlessly pleasure essentially and this is the concept of wire heading it's very popular in science fiction and i and i do think it is somewhat of a risk i don't think it's a a doom scenario but um it is something to be careful about and be thoughtful about okay yeah the people that are actually doing it won't care so it'll just be you know they'll be happy that we have um but uh you know we need we need a sizable team it's unclear how big the team needs to be but i don't think it's one i don't and i don't think it's 10 i think it's probably close to a billion people close to a billion to get us to Mars and and beyond like we like Mars is but the first stop what would be the stop afterwards i don't know i saw some post about like Venus being like completely habitable and like there's something i really have no idea but i mean i imagine it's like alpha centauri and then like every other like uh what is it the uh there's some sort of like the habitable zone like we want people everywhere like we want to expand and and have and have massive you know cities and worlds that you know like avatar shit like we want all this like there's no reason to stop expand always yeah building massive space stations i i love that idea um yeah not not space stations like colonizing actual worlds like like going down from space like yes and space stations and also the moon and also Venus and also Mars and also everywhere you know yeah other other solar systems and then eventually other galaxies like do you think that this is all going to happen in your lifetime it mathematically cannot right like like just unless we break the speed of light and come up with like some sort of you know crazy time travel system like wormhole or something like no we'll never make it to a a you know a you know a solar system that's you know thousand thousands of light years away unless there's like radical radical life extension which is possible well my my thinking about life extension is like you don't have to actually live forever all you have to do is wait until you can live a year in a year and a day longer than yeah you know it takes to actually to year yeah and then you start going you're you're on the compounding cycle um it seems possible then it's just really important that you work by bus i don't think we're too far off but i don't i'm not betting on that okay so you've started multiple companies do you have any stories from starting those companies that you haven't told before they're interesting this is a great question i love stories like this and surfacing new weird stories i need to think of some weird ones that i haven't told i always go to the ones that i've told before but it would be fun to work out an interesting story i have no idea if it's a good story um let's just see um when we did our branding for soil and we worked with this guy writer rips who's a very very interesting and controversial artist he's been like ostracized from the art world but he's like in some ways like a just an artistic genius um he was recently sued by the board a be out club because he like kind of recontext he he he made all these crazy claims about the the project being you know like very controversial and maybe including like hate speech or something it was very very controversial but when we found him he was doing web design consulting for like google and stuff and he was just making cool projects on the web like little interactive uh little interactive websites taking advantage of new like web sockets and new web technology he was like an artist hacker and we saw some profile on him maybe in like advice or something we like this guy is cool we got to work with this guy so we call him up and we say hey we want to do a branding project and he wants to do the look and we want him to do like a logo and packaging design and so we sign in everything and and and uh he he had like a reputation as kind of like a internet troll like had a very funny sense of humor and we were kind of like oh yeah like we can like we can hang with this guy and so he came up with this whole like like brand design like for the logo and uh and we were like we thought it'd be really funny if the soilate logo you know how like many beverage products have a some punctuation at the end we like jolt and it'll have an exclamation mark or like you know so like so there'll be some like intense thing it'll be like a like a period or something um uh we we thought it'd be funny to put a dot dot dot after it like the most ominous logo you could possibly have and so we we were like kind of joking around not really serious that we wanted to do that just kind of joking around so we sent this like this like revision being like what do you think about this and he was just like now this is stupid and and I was like yeah actually it is but um it was a it was a very funny it was a very funny time working with someone like that because uh he did he he was very very good at like kind of honing in all the crazy brand ideas we had like that um like there was a little bit like at the heart of the brand is a cannibalism joke like fundamentally like you cannot get away from that like like so in the green is people in the charlton heston movie and we named the company as a reference to actually the book but the movie as well and so it was just like it's like it's like a silly joke and so um like how do you how do you actually wrangle that in and he came up with something I think he's the one that came up with this but uh he he came up with the idea of putting the nutrition facts in the front of the package because every other brand puts it on the back and they kind of and you have to flip it over and they turn it around and so the initial packaging design for the protein powder was just the logo and then the nutrition facts and the nutrition facts became a design element yeah of the actual packaging and we put it on t-shirts and it was just like a really cool really interesting concept that like you only get from working with like a interesting artist like that uh very very good at like connecting like weird dots but yeah I mean uh and had that just not been done before by another brand I don't think certainly not in the way we'd done it maybe there was some reference I mean he's like a big art history guy really strong artist so I'm sure there was some sort of reference that he was aware of and pulled from um but I don't know exactly what where that came from but I certainly hadn't seen it and it just looks so much different than every other protein shake where it's like you know a wave of chocolate liquid splashing up against like a jacked bro who's like clearly on gear and it was just like a very different look it was just black and white like plain text nutrition facts logo with a box around it like very simple and uh I think it looked cool it was fun and yeah very very very very interesting interesting character writer that's like yeah that's interesting I have you been able to replicate that kind of thinking and creating something fundamentally new you know so you you're even if it's on just the marketing side for that have you done any other things since then certainly having struck lightning like like like like soil it again I've seen it happen um but that's not I don't know if that's really my forte I'm not what would you say that you're like expert at uh I mean I'm good at a few things like I studied economics so I understand the finance of the business like I can actually run the company operations I understand technology I'm a programmer so I can build websites and think about how we use tack uh also like I'm very clearly like from the YouTube like I understand like content and like a pace of content and how to tell stories but that's very different than like coming up with like an iconic brand design yeah very different thing I talked to someone about the brand design behind Warby Parker and he told me that the thesis that Warby Parker used was the literary life and as soon as I heard that I was like wow like that is phenomenal because as soon as you hear that like the literary life like a bookish person like the someone who's like reading a book in a coffee shop or or has a little reading cozy reading nook in their house like everything from their website the colors that they use their their their when they do activations and they do little pop-up shops like everything flows from that and it's very very clear and I never knew that I couldn't reverse engineer that really but once I heard the term literary life everything was just like oh my god it makes so much sense I understand how their whole brand guides and finding those key words where like when I think about Ray Bann or Oakleys or any other I wear company per soul they all have wildly different brands and there was clearly a gap in the market at the time for the literary life and it worked out very very well and so developing those is very very difficult it requires really being in tune with the culture understanding how how to carve something out where the actual like lines of the culture are drawn where you get beyond and then the simultaneous say I alluded to this earlier but but building a brand that is simultaneously narrow enough that it speaks to an early adopter community but then can become broad over time so just like everyone basically everyone thinks it would be awesome to be able to do a kickflip I can't do a kickflip can you do a kickflip but you like Red Bull like at least you'll watch some Red Bull marketing stuff and you might drink one like you know that's fine and it's the same thing with Warby Parker like if you're if you're in the market for glasses like you're like yeah it would be good to like read a novel in a car he shot like that sounds nice even if you're not like the type of person to actually go and do it it is like somewhat aspirational exactly it's just yeah they're they're basically I read this book I think it's like this is marketing by Seth Godin or something and he's like he's got this tagline or whatever that's people like us do things like this yeah right and it's it's so smart you either can appeal to someone like who they want to be yeah or who they actually see themselves as or you know desire to be right and I think that's so smart if you're designing a glasses brand around basically saying are you a reader kind of thing and do you have that same thing with the Lucy to some degree we've experimented with with a bunch and it's evolved and it's never been fully dialed is that is that just harder to do because it's not it's not it's clear to me like I it's almost feels like a it feels like a Mr. Beast challenge where you're you're thinking yourself who is this customer you know and breaking down exactly what who is this person I tried to decide what the target market was but looking at their website I love that um uh yeah it's just hard it's really hard especially in uh in the nicotine category it is it is extremely frustrating because like like just walk through the thought process like you might want to say like hey this is for smokers who this is the new marbro man like you're quitting smoking it's like the FDA comes in oh you can't say quit smoking like that's off the table and so like you can't say smokers you can't say that like there's all these crazy regulations that wind up creating very anodyne brands you you can't say like no you're trying you can say that stuff okay we can for one of our products because our nicotine licences are approved for smoking cessation so we can technically say if you are a smoker and you want to quit smoking use our nicotine licences now for our nicotine gum nicorette is approved as a smokers cessation aid but Lucy nicotine gum is not approved as a smoking cessation aid at least not yet and so we can't say quit smoking with Lucy nicotine gum we can say Lucy nicotine gum tastes great and has four milligrams of nicotine and you know is a generally enjoyable product like we can say all these like vague bland things about it and so that winds up leading to like somewhat of a vague brand I am kind of deferring though because I do admit that like we could have been stronger earlier on and and taking more risk and being a little bit more aggressive with how the brand was developed and found that core niche audience but there was a lot of risk associated with it and there was a lot of what what were the risk the the risk is like okay so let's say that like you know like let's look at the market and see what's out there like nicorette is you know this medicine that's advertised on like you know like probably like Fox News or something or like at CNBC you see some mainstream commercial something that mainstream older audience then zin is like this kind of it's leading brand but it's kind of unclear what it stands for it seems like maybe like the frat bros like it and like but you know it's not really clear exactly who likes it but it's very popular now so it's like where's the gap in the market you have the social proof of everyone using it yeah so let's say okay we're like we are going to make the red bull of nicotine pouches and we're gonna assume that zin is like coffee and we are going to be red bull so we're gonna go after extreme sports we're gonna sponsor Tony Hawk and X games and have people jump out of planes and stuff it's like okay so you do that and then oops kids happen to like that stuff and then the media frames you as someone who is advertising kids because of course kids like skateboarding even though like at this point the average Tony Hawk players probably like gen X are like 40 but you you run into that issue so you wind up needing to create a little bit more of a bland brand but it's kind of a cop out I don't know it's a very it's a very tough scenario yeah that seems like a really tough situation and you have to you have to like design your brand I mean it's also kind of tough because you have to design your brand is like an old person right you don't want you don't want to market to the younger audience right so when people say you know this is me when they see it on screen right with dual it was like people dancing and stuff you know and that was incredibly difficult the product is great let the product speak for itself be very be very just clear in the messaging clear in the branding make it make it less niche and just more obvious to communicate the product like what is this like this is a nicotine gum this is berry citrus flavor there's two milligrams of nicotine in it product contains nicotine nicotine is an addictive chemical like it's very straightforward and so low level of confusion it's hard to speak to people and grow like virally but the people who try the product and like it they stick with it yeah they stick with it and and and the reviews like support time yeah okay final question uh what is the hardest thing that you've ever had to overcome I was just tweeting about this yesterday like you know during the beginning of 2022 the market sold off like really significantly the uh the venture market was a was collapsing the stock market was collapsing you know you were talking about Mark Zuckerberg bringing bringing meta back uh I think they're stock dropped by like 70 percent or something like it was truly like the end of days it felt so dark and and I think people didn't really talk about it because you don't want to say like you're suffering online you kind of just want to post through the pain or make jokes or whatever especially when you're well to do and people don't really yeah all sorts of things it's just like even if you're even if you're broke and you lose your job you don't really want to go on Instagram and be like I just lost my job like this sucks like it's pretty rare that people do that and um people post like aspirational stuff so like we didn't really collectively live through it together but I suspect that a lot of people were like very stressed during that time I certainly was there was a it was a big open question about like where the economy goes like will the government be able to whip inflation and then Q3 came around they and they kind of did it and the recovery started and um things have been looking good ever since the incredible job numbers today markets way up and and things are are looking up generally um but I think for a lot of people it was a real crucible and it certainly was for us at Lucy like so we had been running like kind of the venture capital backed model we'd raised $10 million in venture capital in uh December of 2019 we'd go into covid we're like what does this mean this is very weird but we already had some remote employees and so making the shift to remote temporarily was not very difficult uh sales didn't fall off because we were entirely an e-commerce brand so it was fine we started growing and we kind of realized that like everything was kind of fun it was okay so we kept growing kept spending kept like investing for growth and we were like okay we're the markets good we're gonna go out and raise more money 2022 hits and I'm like there's zero chance we're getting around done like everyone is terrified we have like three months of runway after something uh we're already in a weird category where a lot of venture capitalists don't want to invest in this because it's controversial and they have opinions about addiction and nicotine that you know some of them are revalid it's up to them to make those decisions but it's not like a hot category and certainly not as down the fairway as like enterprise sass or like AI like it's it's just like it's a completely different category they have to really get up to speed on all that we talked about regulatory for like five minutes now imagine like you know someone thinking about putting $10 million into a company it's going to be like months of learning about how the intelligence like a whole new thing yeah so so I was like guys this is not gonna happen like like everyone anyone on this board who thinks we're gonna raise money is delusional we are not raising money like it's not gonna happen we need to think of another option so we completely pivoted the business to just being profitable and so we cut all of our costs fired a bunch of marketing agencies that were underperforming cut our edspin back raised our prices we laid some people off we you know reduced our our executive comp like buy more than two thirds like everything went like you know just the the biggest hammer we could hit and there were some smart people that were saying this at the time like like why see put out a video Dalton called well put out a video kind of saying like guys like make a what make one cut really deep and then start building back that's what meta did that's what ever he did yeah that there's a lot of companies that did that and and we were just like let's be the first one we're small we're agile let's make the change and then let's run this as a profitable business and and and the hard part is that like even after you say like okay we're we're we're cutting ad spend it's like well you're still getting bills in the door from people that you ran ads with like two months ago so you still have to pay those you can't just be like oh we're not advertising more it's like the ads have run we now owe the money and so it took like three to six months to really turn the ship around but then we got profitable and we were profitable all through 2023 and the businesses and like a phenomenal great place now we've grown a ton which has been amazing and it also just kind of proved that like it's just a widgets business and we can just like run it profitably which is kind of cool so I was I was very excited by that how close did you guys get in 2022 like like was there was there a possibility that Lucy does does not exist I mean yes if we hadn't made the changes that we did yeah I mean we had like three months around we would have been dead I don't know how else to put it it's like you probably would have like limped along somehow or something but it would have been it would have been very very rough and at a certain point it's like you need a certain amount of like liquidity and just cash in the bank account to run like a multi-million dollar business just because there's going to be working capital that goes into places like you order some inventory you sell it like there's like you're in your small company there's accounts that are like moving around and swinging and all of a sudden you need to invest a hundred K over here and you're going to get the money back in six months and like you need cash to run a large business that's doing like tens of millions of dollars of sales and so like you just you just cannot run a fifty million dollar business on a million dollars in the bank like it's just it's unless you're like an agency I guess or something but in general like if you have if you're a widgets business you have a good it's very very difficult so managing that was very very very important and it was cool coming out of it we had a really it was a really great experience because like I'd run like the VC backed burning company but I'd never I'd actually never run a profitable business before which is kind of crazy for a decade in entrepreneurship like so I eventually did get profitable and stuff at various points but like I wasn't running it this was like the first company where I was like there's like okay we're far enough along we've like grown this business we we we have customers like like we're flipping the switch and now like we're running this like you know a business is it more fun to run a profitable business than one that's losing money even if it's growing really fast I don't know fun is even KPI I'd be worried about it's somewhat less stressful because you have more leverage right so there's no one that can come in and say like you need to take this deal you need to sell me this business you need to let me join the board you need to you know pay me to promote your thing or you need to you know no one can shake you down because like you're not on a clock so default live very good these these theories are great but yeah I think that's probably in recent memory the hardest moment but a great crucible and very fun to be on the other side yeah that's exciting okay well thank you John thanks for coming on yeah thanks for having me okay